The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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Women’s involvement with print (as authors, readers, and even printers)
meant that they too contributed to the growing assault on social deference, joined
in the formation of a culture of political dissent, and began taking part in the
undermining of British political authority in the 1760s and 1770s. In Williamsburg,
Clementina Rind took over husband William Rind’s print shop when he died in
1773, publishing one version of the Virginia Gazette for two years. [See Appendix
for a timeline of the multiple Virginia printers.] At least one researcher suggested
that her personal interests influenced the content of her newspaper. A poem by “A
Lady” celebrated the arrival in the colony of Lady Dunmore, the governor’s wife:
“Hail, noble Charlotte! Welcome to the plain …” 57 As unrest regarding
Parliament’s actions towards the colonies intensified, Mrs. Rind reprinted from the
South Carolina Gazette a letter from “A Planter’s Wife” exhorting women to not
use tea, and another letter from Virginia women addressed to ladies of
Pennsylvania, exhorting them to avoid all imported luxuries. This was “probably the
greatest concentration of women’s writing to date in an American periodical and
certainly the greatest in any southern colonial newspaper.” 58
Mrs. Rind found herself in the middle of a political controversy, forcing her
to define what freedom of the press meant, when she refused to print a contribution
she thought libelous. Her competitors’ newspaper printed an anonymous letter
questioning Rind’s principles of press liberty, suggesting that she suppressed a
contributor’s letter despite her newspaper’s motto, “Open to ALL PARTIES, but
influenced by NONE.” Rind reluctantly replied to that charge in her next issue: “I
shall ever feel a very sensible concern at being obliged to enter into altercations of
any nature whatever …” but she felt forced to vindicate herself. She wrote that her
open publication policy did not include slander, that the letter in question contained
57 Jane Carson, Clementina Rind (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, research report
series 47, {19--}. Rind’s Virginia Gazette (Clementina Rind, March 3, 1774), 3.
58 Ibid., September 15, 1774, 1. Kierner, Beyond the Household, 79.